Uselessness

A man moves from bohemian youth to bourgeois middle-age. In Paris he loses his first love, desultorily picks up another before temporarily reconnecting with his first, develops interests at school, makes a stab at a career, then pitches everything and goes back home. In Puerto Rico he fumbles around, then fades from the story as he becomes a university professor, married, and a father. In his place he describes a dying (and eventually dead) colleague and a former student with a talent for bad poetry and squandering advantages. The end.

The story moves along, but in no particular direction. He claims art, but in incidentals and asides; a diarrhea attack at the start of a vacation gets more detail than his artistic life. His side of romance is banal and self-centered, and her side doesn't appear, not even speculatively. His behavior doesn't change much from his complicated first love to his more straightforward Parisian lover, and his wife is mentioned only as an object in his life, like his car. His studies give him drive and purpose, which evaporates at the first sign of tedium. This is definitely the story of a guy going through stuff, but after that I don't know, which is maybe the point.